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“... wedding and the end of his student days), he has plans for a kind of Japanese-Australian War and Peace that will take ‘a decade to prepare before I even begin to write’. If he succeeds, it will be ‘the book into which I finally disappear, having overcome an inordinate need for attention the only way I could, by reducing it to absurdity’: The year ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... masterpiece Waverley, a novel without which not only The Thirty-Nine Steps but also War and Peace could never have been written. It is interesting, though, that a critic so alive to Scott’s exquisite irony and good humour should lack a comparable lightness of touch. The only jokes in Kerrigan’s book are made at the expense of the ...”

“... with his hawkish American anaesthetist, whose rants about Iraq tend to drive Perowne into the peace camp. But he observes with mild disapproval the levity of the marchers gathering outside: ‘If they think – and they could be right – that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an ...”

“... her ‘vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace.’ On her return from Ireland, Caroline put on a charade near Brocket. Villagers danced round a fire, on which Byron was being burned in effigy, throwing his letters and gifts to her into the flames. But the burnt offerings were only copies. Even then ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... this would be an attack on one of its means of livelihood and would be construed as a threat to peace; the Arab scheme, they claimed, denied Israel’s right to exist. At the Alexandria Summit in September 1964, by which time Israel had already begun test pumpings on the first stage of the National Water Carrier, the Arab states decided to go ahead with the ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... Duffy calls ‘famous, fatuous, but fatally quotable’. Among the living, Duffy takes issue with David Loades, the biographer of Mary who, while he has modified his earlier views on the ineffectiveness of the Marian bishops and their campaign, still believes (in Duffy’s account of his position) that they did ‘too little, too late’ to restore England to ...”

“... the world is not easily forgotten: 142 killed in Yemen when two Shia mosques were bombed; 103 peace protesters killed by a suicide bomber in Ankara; 224 blown up on a Metrojet flight to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”